GrandView on Windows 2000 Pro

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 935

Posted by kidder
2001-02-09 19:03:10

Hello All,

I build high-end engineering workstations and minimalist satellite machines for small office peer-to-peer networks. I also do a lot of legacy work, resurrecting old engineering archives and CAD files from 5 1/4” floppies to 3 1/2” diskettes or CD-ROMs or Zip disks, whatever. I have been using computers since the days when a “PC” was a TTY connected to a time-sharing mainframe somewhere on the planet (at 110 Baud and $85 a minute).

The first computer I actually owned was a Rockwell AIM65 with an 8-bit 6502 CPU, 4096 bytes of 450 microsecond static RAM, 20K of operating system in ROM, a 20 column thermal printer, a 20 character LCD display and a tape cassette for storage. I never had as much fun before or since with any other computer. The next computer was an Osborne Z80 luggable with 64K of RAM running under CP/M 2.3. I had a lot of fun with that machine, too.

My first PC as such was a thirty pound Compaq “portable” with 256K of RAM and two 360K 5 1/4” floppy drives running under MSDOS 1.12. That machine ultimately acquired another 384K of RAM and a 20M Hardcard. This is the machine on which I first ran ThinkTank. I remember that ThinkTank 2.0 had an unfortunate “Black Hole” in it that sometimes caused the file structure to collapse, which resulted in lost work. ThinkTank 2.4, as I recall, was much better mannered in that regard. ThinkTank 2.4 became one of my most important tools for writing and for sorting out ideas. I still have the original Versions 2.0 and 2.4 floppies.

When Symantec acquired Living VideoText and announced that they were rolling ThinkTank (and Ready!) into GrandView I was afraid that it was the end for ThinkTank’s functionality, but I upgraded anyway. I eventually got used to GrandView, and to my surprise it did indeed reflect a great deal of ThinkTank. In any case, I’ve been using it ever since. As I mentioned earlier, I do a lot of legacy work, so my last three computers dual-booted in DOS as well as Windows NT or 2000 Pro (my current workstation). When I wanted to use GrandView I simply rebooted into DOS.

A couple of months ago, while skating around in Symantec’s Web site, I was surprised to discover some update files for GrandView which allowed it to run under Windows 3.1. I had thought that GrandView had long since gone the way of the Dodo bird so I promptly downloaded them and installed them. After a little tinkering to work around an idiosyncracy of my workstation, I right-clicked on the executable file name to put the icon on my desktop. When I double-clicked the icon, it started up in Windows 2000 Pro. As far as I can tell, it works fine, with one exception: I can’t get the underline part of the text cursor. The characters change color when the cursor passes them, except for spaces. If the cursor happens to be on a space, I can’t see it, I have to move it to a character with an arrow key to find it. It’s a minor glitch that doesn’t interfere with my use of GrandView otherwise. If anyone knows of a patch to correct it, I would certainly like to know about it. An oddity in launching GrandView is that it complains about 16-bit VDDs in the registry being in an invalid format, but I click the “Ignore” button. Then the GrandView button appears on the task bar, and when I click that, GrandView comes up, ready to go. It’s good to have my old partner to hand again.

Regards to all,

Bob Kidder.

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